My Kitchen Table

America Ten Years After Columbine

The American debate about gun regulation begins and ends with a tacit agreement that the occasional massacre is the price we pay for freedom. No wonder teddy bears and candles are the only national gun policy we have. -- Dahlia Litwick, Slate

It’s always been a mystery to me. The way so many of my fellow Americans feel about guns. It’s as if a country that is normally sane and thoughtful suddenly loses its mind and adopts a position so extreme that to question it at all is considered anti-American.

I don’t own a gun. My brother had an old .22 (I think) pea shooter when he was a kid. I’m not sure he ever fired it. I sure don’t remember him doing so. And I don’t normally hang out with people who own guns. Or at least who don’t do so ostentatiously. My best friend’s roommate in Georgia once told me she had a pistol, but I never saw it.

When I moved here from Canada in 1991, I knew what that meant. It meant more religion in politics (there is almost none in Canada) and that you couldn’t talk about gun control. And it’s not that I hate guns. Humans have been hunting forever. And Americans have been hunting with guns since the first settlers landed in Jamestown.

No, it’s not guns themselves; it’s the people who use them. I suppose that’s what the NRA means when it says that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. It’s true. But what the NRA never adds is that guns, especially assault weapons and the like, make it a lot easier to kill a lot of people all at once over a very quick period of time.

After all, do we really believe that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold could have stabbed 13 students and teachers to death, or that Seung-Hui Cho could have walked the corridors of Virginia Tech and stabbed 32 people to death in 10 to 12 minutes? Of course not. And any one who is being honest with themselves will agree. (A 1998 study on penetrating cardiac injuries found that the mortality rate for gunshot wounds to the heart is 84%, compared to 30% for people who sustain stab wounds to the heart, for instance.)

Guns don’t kill people, but they make it a lot easier to kill people. A lot of people.

I suppose that’s what Dahlia Litwick means when she says that the occasional (I would say regular) mass murder is the price we pay for freedom. The NRA certainly thinks it’s a fair trade. No question the same is true for Republicans. And Democrats are more than happy (or too scared to do otherwise) to trade votes for dead children in a school library. Or murdered immigrants at a community center. Or slain policemen in Oakland and in Pittsburgh.

What I find the most amusing about the real hardcore gun rights people -- you know, the ones who protest when any politician tries to enact laws that will make it easier for police to track guns used by criminals, or that stem the flow of Americans guns to murderous drug gangs in Mexico, or that allow officials in New York to stop guns shops in Virginia from selling weapons that kill cops in the Big Apple, or that stop the sale of ammunition like hollow point bullets -- is their argument that we can’t have ANY kind of gun control because we always have to be ready in case the government tries to make us all slaves. We all need to be able to purchase an Uzi, you know, just in case a black helicopter lands in our backyard and tries to take us to the gulags that Glenn Beck likes to hallucinate about on Fox. And there is no middle ground, no reasonable compromise.

Look, I don’t want to take hunters’ guns from them. And I do believe that people have a right to defend themselves and their property. But try as I might, I still struggle to see why it’s an infringement of anyone’s right to go through a background check at a gun show. After all, we go through all kinds of security checks at airports these days and there are far fewer people killed by terrorism in American each year than die by hand guns for instance. Or in those ‘occasional massacres.’

Or why people object to measures that would help law enforcement do a better job - normally something the right falls over itself to accomplish. Only on this issue do those on the right sound like they belong to the Weather Underground, where everybody has to be afraid of ‘the man.”

But I also recognize that this is a losing battle. Certainly at this moment. The NRA has effectively neutralized most voices, certainly in the Congress and even in the White House. That’s just realpolitiks. As I said, even asking to talk about the issue brings out mass mailings and e-mail bombs that raise “they’re going to take out guns away” hysteria to a level that the NRA can easily raise millions dollars in a couple of hours. Just counterproductive.

So as we sit here 10 years after Columbine (and just a few of the better known ‘occasional massacres’ that have happened since that day) and all we can basically say is, well, too bad. Real shame, eh. Pity that it happened. Why, we ought to do something about that.

Like next to nothing. Or just nothing at all. Nothing.

 

This is a list of some of the mass shootings in the US since Columbine. I included the one from 1984, because I still think it’s one of the country’s worst.

--July 18, 1984, James Huberty opened fire at a McDonald’s restaurant in Southern California, killing 22 people and wounding 19 others.

-- Atlanta,Georgia, July 1999. A stockmarket day trader goes on a day-long shooting rampage, killing 12 people including his wife and two children before taking his own life.

-- Fort Worth,Texas, September 1999. A gunman opens fire at a prayer service, killing six people before committing suicide.

-- Dec. 26, 2000. Michael McDermott kills seven co-workers at an Internet consulting company in Wakefield,Massachusetts.

-- Washington, October 2002. A series of sniper-style shootings, some carried out from the boot of a car, claims 10 lives, mostly in the Washington area. Many of the attacks were carried out with a semi-automatic assault rifle.

-- Chicago, August 2003. A worker who was laid off shoots and kills six of his former co-workers with a semi-automatic pistol. The shooter had a lengthy arrest record, including for weapons offenses.

-- Birchwood,Wisconsin, November 2004. A hunter opens fire with an SKS assault rifle, killing six other hunters and wounding two after an argument.

-- Brookfield, Wisconsin, March 2005. A man fires 22 rounds during a church service, killing seven people.

-- Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, October 2006. A truck driver armed with two rifles, a semi-automatic handgun and 600 rounds of ammunition kills five schoolgirls execution-style in an Amish schoolhouse, and seriously wounds six others before shooting himself.

-- Blacksburg,Virginia, April 2007. A student shoots 47 people at Virginia Tech, killing 32 before he commits suicide, in the deadliest mass shooting in the United States.

-- Omaha,Nebraska, December 2007. Nine people are killed and five others injured after a 20-year-old shooter armed with a military-style assault rifle attacks shoppers in a mall.

-- Carnation,Washington. December 2007. A woman and her boyfriend shoot dead six members of her family, including two children, ages three and six, on Christmas Eve, using large-caliber pistols.

-- Chicago. February 2008. Six women are tied-up and shot at a suburban clothing store. Five of the women die. The gunman has not been found.

-- DeKalb,Illinois. February 2008. A man opens fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University, killing five students and wounding 16 before turning his weapon on himself.

-- Alger,Washington. September 2008. A mentally ill man who had been released from jail a month earlier shoots eight people, killing six.

-- Covina,California. December 2008. A man dressed in a Santa Claus suit opens fire at a family Christmas party at his ex-wife's home and then sets fire to the house. Nine people are killed in the home. The gunman later kills himself.

-- Geneva County and Coffee County, Alabama. March 12 2009. In a shooting spree that tears through several towns, a 28-year-old out-of-work man kills 10 people, including his mother and a toddler.

-- North Carolina. March 29, 2009. A heavily-armed gunman shoots dead eight people, many elderly and sick patients, in a North Carolina nursing home.

-- Santa Clara,California, March 30, 2009. Six people are shot dead in an apparent murder-suicide at a home in an upscale Silicon Valley neighborhood.

-- Binghamton, New York. April 3, 2009. Up to 13 people are killed as a gunman goes on a rampage at a civic center in the town of Binghamton.

The truth about US and torture

“inter arma silent leges” - In times of war, the laws are silent.

Cicero

Five years ago this month, on the day the Abu Gharab photos were released, a friend stopped by my desk at the Christian Science Monitor. He saw that I was writing on the photos for that day’s version of The Daily Update on Terrorism and Security. “I can’t actually believe this happened,” he said to me. I turned and looked at him. I told him I could. He was shocked by my answer. “Americans don’t do that kind of thing,” he told me. I just smiled at him.

He was wrong. Americans absolutely do that kind of thing. Over the decades, we have tortured and abused people with the best (or worst) of them. Whether you’re talking about the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the two World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and now (as we know from the release of the torture documents today), Iraq and Afghanistan, US soldiers or agents of the government have carried out acts which under modern definitions can be called war crimes.

There is one important difference, however, that I will discuss a little bit later.

Take, for instance, Andersonville during the Civil War, a Confederate POW camp so foul that its commander was executed at war’s end, the only Confederate official to be tried and convicted of war crimes resulting from that “late unpleasantness.” Meanwhile, during the Spanish-American War, in particular during fighting in the Philippines, the atrocities being committed by American troops against the native population grew so intense that President McKinley blocked press reports from the region for fear it would harm his chances at reelection in 1900.

If you want to know about the kinds of brutal torture that we carried out in Vietnam, read this piece from former UPI correspondent Perry Deane Young on what he and his roommate, the late Sean Flynn, saw during their years there:

“The two pictures that I had saved show [from Flynn’s work] one Viet Cong prisoner strapped to an Asian version of the western cross; another one shows a VC suspect being strung upside down for his interrogation. These were routine procedures. In the manuscript for my Vietnam memoir, Two of the Missing, I had mentioned another popular method of attaching a crank telephone with wires to a man's testicles.”

Which brings us to the release today of four “torture” memos written by senior Bush administration officials. There was intense pressure on President Obama not to release the memos. But to his credit, he did, and although he did say that he would not seek to prosecute CIA staffers who tortured suspects “believing in good faith that they had legal authority to do what they did,” don’t be surprised if we find that a few of them didn’t act in good faith, especially those lawyers who wrote the memos. (John Yoo and Jay Bybee, are you listening?)

The memos show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that in order to fight evil, we succumbed to it ourselves. As Cicero noted in the quote at the top, we basically suspended the laws we believe in, the ones that we like to tell the rest of the world makes us different from the bad guys, and instead we did things that run contrary to the ‘Judeo-Christian” ethic so many in the Bush administration liked to talk about.

And that also leads to another conclusion, one that I will give the floor to columnist/blogger Andrew Sullivan to make:

“I do not believe that any American president has ever orchestrated, constructed, or so closely monitored the torture of other human beings the way George W. Bush did. It is clear that it is pre-meditated; and it is clear that the parsing of torture techniques that you read in the report is a simply disgusting and repellent piece of dishonesty and bad faith. When you place it alongside the Red Cross' debriefing of the torture victims, the fit is almost perfect. I say "almost" because even Jay Bybee, in this unprofessional travesty of lawyering, stipulates that these techniques might be combined successively in any ways that could cumulatively become torture even in his absurd redefinition of the term. And yet the ICRC report shows, as one might imagine that outside these specious legalisms, such distinctions never hold in practice. And they didn't. Human beings were contorted into classic stress positions used by the Gestapo; they had towels tied around their necks in order to smash their bodies against walls; they were denied of all sleep for up to eleven days and nights at a time; they were stuck in tiny suffocating boxes; they were waterboarded just as the victims of the Khmer Rouge were waterboarded. And through all this, Bush and Cheney had lawyers prepared to write elaborate memos saying that all of this was legal, constitutional, moral and not severe pain and suffering.”

But we’re American. We don’t torture, right? We don’t do the things that we demand that other people be hunted down, captured and brought back for trial? Right.

In the end, the pure blind truth is that for all our fine words, when you come right down to it, there is very, very little difference between many of the people making the decisions on our side, and those making the decisions on the other side. Decisions that they then tell young men and women to carry out.

But there is that one difference I mentioned above, and it’s what I hope will save us once again. For every George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, or LBJ and Robert McNamara, or Nixon and Kissinger, there is a man or a woman in the US military or in a group like the ACLU or Human Rights Watch, who just won’t let them get away with it. Who fight and fight and fight until the truth comes out. And as much as Americans hate to have that mirror held up to their faces, and to see themselves reflected in that mirror, it is the one thing that brings us out of our brutality and reminds us why this nation was founded in the first place.

If there is anything that makes us different from the “bad guys,” it is this willingness to put our sins out in front of the world. It is a sign of the moral courage that others want to respect in us. And if we are to regain our place of respect with those we care about in the world, it’s a necessity to undertake.

God's will?

So this guy, C. Wielinski, was sitting at his dining room table in his home in Buffalo, and a plane literally fell on him and killed him. I confess I have a hard time seeing "God's will" in this. I find the idea repugnant - that God would "preordain" that Wielinski would die in this way. I guess that's why I could never be a Christian fundamentalist.

A couple of months ago, I heard on NPR one of the survivors of the '"infamous" plane crash in the Andes in the 70s when the survivors ate the bodies in order not to starve to death. He said something that has become my personal mantra: "Plan like you'll live to be 100, live like you'll die tomorrow."

Because you just never know when a plane will fall out of the sky on you.

Sources: Obama will move slowly on repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"

The Boston Globe reports that Barack Obama will move slowly on repealing the U.S. military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy towards gays in the services. Apparently Obama will let the Pentagon conduct "a comprehensive assessment of the impact that such a move would have on military discipline." And he will attempt to build up more support in Congress for his promise to let gays serve openly.

Sources in the military and in the administration say Obama's team is eager not to make the same mistake the Clinton administration made. President Clinton first signed an order allowing gays to serve openly but the reaction against the move was so great, he was forced to recind it and substitute the current policy instead.

It seems the president is taking his time here, but his intention to change the law seems clear. As recently as Jan. 15, his press secretary Robert Gibbs said Obama would take action to overturn "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

FDA: Georgia peanut plant "lab shopped" to get positive result

USA Today reports that the FDA is accusing the Georgia-based Peanut Corporation of America (PCA) of "lab shopping" to get positive results when 12 times in 2007 and 2008 the company found traces of salmonella in its products.

If this is true, then we're moving to a whole new level of criminality here. We're talking about a company that knowingly put a dangerous product out on the market. But then their luck ran out and now hundreds are sick and eight are dead.

These bozos are lucky that they live in the US. Here they might go to jail for a while if the charges prove to be true. In China, they would face execution for doing the same thing.

Faith and begora Barack!

Well, we Irish like to take credit for everything (the best whiskey, the best writers, the best drunks, etc.). So now it seems we're trying to take credit for Barack O'Bama too!

Kudos to the FBI

By the way, I wanted to give kudos to the FBI for the way it handled the mix-up with the two Washington DC Arab-American families that were taken off an AirTran flight to Orlando on New Year's Day. As soon as the FBI realized that it was all much ado about nothing, agents acted right away to get the families back on a flight to their destination. And then when AirTran refused to book the families - even after the FBI said they were completely cleared -- the agents made sure they were booked on another airline.

AirTran comes out looking pretty bad. Even if you can justify the original action of removing the families from the flight, the airline's refusal to rebook the family after the FBI clearance is as clear an example of racism and profiling as you can find. No doubt this was pointed out to the airline's brass by a company lawyer after AirTran had once again refused to apologize, and lead to it completely reversing its original positions.

Losers. Won't get any of my business.

Panetta to head CIA

Well, I wouldn't have called this one in a million years.

President-elect Barack Obama named former Congressman, former White House chief of staff and former head of the Office of Budget and management Leon Panetta to be his new CIA chief. On the surface, Panetta doesn't seem the spy-master type. But NPR notes that Lee Hamilton, co-chairman of the Iraq Study Group and vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, called Obama's choice of Panetta "superb."

"If confirmed, he would take over the helm of the CIA at a time when the intelligence community has been under fire, though I think they have made some progress in recent years," says Hamilton, a Democrat who served in Congress with Panetta and is now president and director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "But the intelligence community has a lot of problems with public perception, and Leon is a very good communicator."

This is what I like the most about Obama. He's been getting whacked by the media and some left-wing groups and individuals for not appointing people way outside the mainstream. But when you look at the people he does appoint, they are all a bit outside the envelope in some way, and have specific talents that make them remarkably suited for their new jobs. Obama seems more interested in governing than just in engaging in politics (although he does that at times as well).

The Far-right's real nightmare

I have friends out here in rural Virginia who think this is really going to happen:

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Home, at last

I wasn't born in this country. I spent my first 38 years in Canada. I became a citizen in 2000 because I can't live somewhere and not vote. But I've never felt like an "American." I've always felt more like a member of a club that I could leave anytime I wanted to. I've always believed in America and what it could be, but I always felt disappointed. American never matched up to my personal image of "the shining city on the hill." It was just easier to consider myself a Canadian who became an American for legal reasons.

Last night was the first time since I lived in the U.S. that I actually felt like an American, like a part of something really important. That I was really proud of MY country. That this country is my home. Last night was a joining of all the things that I've always believe make America exceptional.

Americans don't understand how much people around the world want America to be something special. That's why so many of them often express anger and frustration at us. They know that we are capable of so much more. And that when America that is true to its principles, it really is a beacon of hope to the world.

I'm a 52-year old white male and I can't wait for the next few years. I know I sound like a Pollyanna. But to tell you the truth, I wouldn't trade this feeling for a million bucks.